John Irving Quotes

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.

ARE THEY ESPECIALLY WILD?

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?

It is the well educated who will improve society — and they will improve it, at first, by criticizing it, and we are giving them the tools to criticize it. Naturally, as students, the brighter of them will begin their improvements upon society by criticizing us.” To Owen, old Archie Thorndike would sing a slightly different song: “It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change. I’m not going to change; I’m going to retire! Get the new headmaster to make the changes; that’s when I made changes — when I was new.” “WHAT CHANGES DID YOU MAKE?” Owen Meany asked. “That’s another reason I’m retiring!” old Thorny told Owen amiably. “My memory’s shot!

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything — maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he'd at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

Love was certainly not safe - not ever.

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn-they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn's soul-they don't care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don't care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children? They condemn others for the accident of conception; they condemn the poor-as if the poor can help being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to be in control of the size of their families. I thought that freedom of choice was obviously democratic-was obviously American!

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death — even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.